Who wants to watch 'Bank Bailout 2'?

Life has been so dull since the nation’s major banks had their last existential crisis a year or so ago. Right now, it’s like watching a beloved rerun.

We know how the story is most likely to end. The banks will lose billions. It will take a decade or so to drain the swamps — also known as the balance sheets of institutions like the Bank of America and Citigroup — of overvalued and underperforming assets. In the meantime, however, the government will probably jump in and save the banks from themselves once again.

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But this time, the bailout will be more subtle because the regulators don’t have to come up with cash. They just have to persuade a few judges to bend the rules a little bit while the banks foreclose on people’s homes.

In the crisis this time, regulators have a stark choice. They must decide whether to bend — and sometimes break — a few laws so banks can cover their loan losses by foreclosing on mortgages with faulty or nonexistent documentation or to enforce centuries-old real estate laws and force banks to live by the rules.

Bankers and their lobbyists are trying to portray this mess as just another example of the out-of-control U.S. legal system, throwing bureaucratic hurdles in the path of stouthearted capitalists merely trying to protect their investments. But from another viewpoint, this foreclosure crisis is — like the crises preceding it — the result of sloppy, inattentive management, weak internal controls and more than occasional shady practices by bankers run amok.

Unfortunately, both viewpoints are accurate. The legal system is out of control. But that does not excuse the fact that the bankers’ bad practices caused this mess in the first place.

The media have not helped in sorting out villains from victims. Problems are blandly described as the cause of “improper paperwork,” “missing files” and, a bit more ominously, “robo-signers,” who spend seconds reviewing legal documents before signing. Anyone who has ever rented a car, signed the contract without reading it and lost the paperwork is guilty of these kinds of transgressions. Such vague problems might not be a valid excuse for preventing legal proceedings in the eyes of any but the most rigid formalist.

Two facts are worth considering, however. First, the documentation problems affect the rights of real people. Errors can lead to people being evicted from their homes when they aren’t behind on payments. Or foreclosure proceeds might be paid to the wrong bank — and then the bank that was actually owed the money hounds the dispossessed homeowner to pay again.